


Dying Star

by miraphora



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Not A Fix-It, a little dark, but it's over quick, expanded on my own line in a previous fic bc i can, i never met a metaphor that i didn't want to let get away from me, if you can believe it i hadn't read the novelization when i wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 19:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10703520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miraphora/pseuds/miraphora
Summary: I told myself I wouldn't do this, but I'm a liar. Here, have some imagery: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/hubble-sees-a-dying-stars-final-moments





	Dying Star

**Author's Note:**

> Post-note: So I finally read the novelization the other night and everything about the strangely inexorable way Freed develops Jyn's character and the arc to Scarif felt EERILY FAMILIAR. So I came back and read this again and was like "hah. on the nose."

Jyn Erso sweeps into Cassian Andor’s life like a solar wind, and at her back is always the radiation and scorching heat of destruction. Jedha burns to ashes in her wake and he counts himself lucky that they escape that cataclysm, bursting through atmosphere into the striation of hyperspace.

He thinks he’s done after that, but his orders take him to Eadu and one step closer to the inexorable well of darkness that pulls all the light in the galaxy towards its heart. He nearly kills her father, but the lack of tension on the trigger proves to matter not at all. Her scorn burns him to ashes.

She doesn’t even know it, but she is pulling him in, pulling them all in, dragging them into the turbulent wake of her sudden and inexorable conviction. She will wind them up and the pressure of her fate will compress them until they are nothing but kyber burning at the heart of a dying star.

He knows it when he brings the volunteers to her, like tribute to a celestial goddess. He is caught and the prison he brings wherever he goes snaps shut around the collateral lives he touches.

She becomes incandescent in the vault as the end becomes clear. Her father secured this fate and set her on this course and the heat in her heart begins to radiate, waves of stardust spooling out into the cold black of space, glittering and beautiful and deadly. Each rung that they climb toward the tower brings them closer to the final moment.

His battered body wants to rest at the base of that tower, but her gravity sucks him in, his limbs negotiating the climb like a toy soldier. He is nothing but rubble, the ruins of broken moons, yawing into the emptiness that forms inside her. 

The man in white. The curvature of the Death Star over the horizon. The dark of the turbolift and the way he sways against her, unable to help himself, unable to resist the copper tang of her bloodied lips.

She holds him in the end, tenderly, like a lover. The supernova consumes them both, ashes, dust, and a new galaxy is born.


End file.
